Places

Cycling stops in Czechia

234 places · 12 routes · Czech Republic

Czechia is castle country: ride almost any river valley and something medieval watches you from a hill.

The riding runs from the Moravian wine hills in the south-east to the woods west of Prague, mostly on quiet roads between villages three or four kilometres apart. The point is never the destination. It is what you roll past on the way.

A landscape somebody designed

The corner where Moravia meets Austria is not scenery that happened. Two centuries of Liechtenstein princes shaped the country between Lednice and Valtice into a single composed park, and they built follies across it to be looked at from each other. The Minaret carries a 302-step spiral staircase to three stacked galleries, and from the top the view runs over the whole estate to the Pálava hills and, on a clear day, the White Carpathians. The Tři Grácie pavilion was sited to face a companion building across a pond, one of several staged sightlines built deliberately into the estate.

It is flat, which for once is the point: you can ride the whole composition in an afternoon and the distance between follies is the exhibit.

Pálava, and the wine under it

One limestone ridge rises out of the vineyards above the Nové Mlýny reservoirs and everything in this part of the map arranges itself around it. People have used the Děvín ridge for at least thirty thousand years: the summit carries hillfort earthworks refortified from the Iron Age into the Great Moravian period, and the amber road up the Dyje valley passed close by. Mikulov's castle sits on its own limestone hill at the end of it, held by the Liechtensteins from 1249 and rebuilt in Baroque by the Dietrichsteins; Napoleon stopped there on 12 December 1805.

The wine is not a souvenir here. Sonberk, Gurdau, Lahofer and the U Kapličky cellars all sit on riding roads with tasting rooms open to anyone who arrives, and Šobes is a vineyard inside a national park on a bend of the Dyje.

Brno, and a battlefield you can ride across

Brno holds the one building here that people travel specifically to see: in Vila Tugendhat the two full-height glass walls of the living room retract completely into the floor, opening the room onto the terrace. Fritz and Greta Tugendhat lived in it for eight years before fleeing in 1938.

East of the city the ground is farmland with a monument on it. Austerlitz was fought across these fields in 1805, and the Cairn of Peace exists because a Brno priest, Alois Slovák, spent years walking the battlefield and could not accept that the dead had no grave anyone remembered. It took him over a decade to get a foundation stone, and the monument he got honours no side's victory. Pracký kopec and Žuráň, the rises the commanders used, are a short ride away and read as ordinary hills until you know.

Start here

Cafés

Food

Climbs, views & nature

History & landmarks

Climbs